or is Swedish Public Service Radio unconsciously supporting terrorism acts?

The Mole within your organization is likely not a Mole but very likely targeted and vetted by MICE, or actually by using the protocol MICE, an acronym for Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. By using the techniques behind the acronym MICE, you understand Your Adversary.

There are many different reasons why malicious actors would conduct an insider act. The principles can be used to determine the motives behind those conducting the targeting. Having this understanding will enable visibility into your entity's risk management and will allow your security staff to.

Money

Money, or actually greed, is the most common motive. Money is a huge motivator for us all, and it's no different for espionage targeting.

Ideology

For those who fall into the hacktivist group of threat actors, ideology is a big motivating factor, for instance, Qanon in USA or other groups destabilizing society during the Pandemic.

Well-known hacktivists align with these new globalized and Internet-based groups Anonymous, use ideology to inspire themselves and like-minded followers to support their many "causes." Their latest campaigns focusing on vaccination are very much ideology driven. These campaigns revolve around ideology.

Ideology can also be based on patriotism. Russian actors, who some maintain are not controlled by the Kremlin, have been known to target adversaries in recent Russian military actions, like those seen in the Ukraine and the Russo-Georgian conflict of 2008.

Compromise

The term compromise here is more about the threat in the human terrain, or the insider threat, and not the digital one. Compromise can be seen in the form of blackmail or coercion of an individual to assist in corporate espionage or sabotage. If a malicious actor has knowledge that poses a threat to someone's livelihood or social standing, it would be easy to coerce that individual into performing actions on behalf of the actor. These actions could be assisting with remote or physical access or giving up proprietary data, intellectual property, or sensitive system information.

Ego

Finally, there are those who hack simply for the joy of taking down a target and inflating their ego. They want to establish themselves and their power in the community.

Conclusion

When determining what your threat landscape is and the risks to your information and assets, knowing an attacker's motivation can allow for grouping and categorizing these threats. Using "MICE" to gain this understanding will enable you to determine:

1. For those that are financially motivated, is my business a high target?
2. Would those that are motivated by ideology view my organization as a threat to their social views?
3. Are there former employees that have left with a grudge and have the knowledge of our infrastructure to gain unauthorized access?

Next level of identifying the motives beyond MICE

Focusing just on MICE would be to simplify the recruitment of an insider or an agent. Most services and clandestine services have either developed these techniques themselves supported by in-house psychologists or piggy-backed on publicly accessible and very much applicable research within social psychology. One who has been questioning this old approach of MICE or actually remodeled it is the former CIA spook Randy Burkett. He has argued that today's agent recruiters must learn and use the significant findings of human motives and the means for influencing people. He often refers to the studies and experiments of Dr. Robert Cialdini. Burkett aligns with my own experience of using these generic factors for influencing people. These are applicable to tentative insiders as well. These techniques have been elaborated by Daniel Pink, and both of them as authors shared many different approaches to the psychology of influencing. Concerning improving the productivity of existing insiders or agents, other techniques of management are even more efficient. Therefore, I make a distinction between motivation factors and motives.

But what were the motives for a terrorist, who was interviewed by a journalist at the Public Service Radio (Sveriges Radio – Ekot) to start a love affair with the journalist? He was to be deported, as he is a threat to National Security. She wrote articles about the indictment. What were his motives, what were his motivators? Was MICE applicable? And is it to be considered a malicious act? Is she an intended or unintended Insider affecting the public opinion concerning the suspected terrorist?